What he reveals turns our blood to ice. Dr. Thaddeus—superintendent of the whole school district—has been out to get Mr. Kermit all year. He found a way to use our scores on the state science assessment to get Ribbit declared an incompetent teacher. He’ll be out of a job at the end of this term.
“I knew it!” Aldo rages. “We flunked the test!”
“You didn’t,” Jake insists. “None of you did. It’s a numbers game—if you fiddle with them enough, you can get them to say almost anything.”
“It’s no game,” I say bitterly. “It’s our teacher, and he’s getting fired for no reason.”
“Who does that guy Thaddeus think he is?” Barnstorm growls.
“He’s like Voldemort and Darth Vader rolled into one,” Mateo adds.
Miss Fountain appears in the doorway. “Since Mr. Kermit’s absent, I thought it would be nice if both classes shared Circle Time today.”
She picked the worst possible time for that invitation. Circle Time? When our teacher’s getting shafted? A chorus of protest begins in our throats—one that Jake silences by raising one warning finger.
“Circle Time sounds great, Em—uh, Miss Fountain,” Jake accepts on our behalf. “We’ll be right there.”
It’s the last thing we’re in the mood for. How can the superintendent be so mean? Why would he even want to? Maybe Mr. Kermit was a lousy teacher back in the crossword puzzle era, but now he’s the greatest!
As we grumble and seethe our way next door to room 115, I sidle up to Jake. “How can this be?” I ask in distress. “I know I got a ninety-six. And if everybody else passed, that shouldn’t add up to failure no matter how much you crunch the numbers.”
He looks at me sympathetically. “You have to understand, Kiana. You weren’t a registered student on test day, so the ninety-six doesn’t count.”
I stumble into Miss Fountain’s classroom, my mind a pinwheel. The news of the past few minutes has been a bomb blast, but this might be even worse. Our teacher is being fired, and sure, it’s the superintendent’s fault. It’s the school’s fault for not supporting Mr. Kermit. It might even be a little bit Jake’s fault for that cheating scandal so long ago.
But mostly, it’s my fault. If I was properly registered, Dr. Thaddeus would have to count my score. But no—I was a short-timer. This hick town and hick school had nothing to teach me. I was just passing through. What difference did it make what happened here?
Well, it’s making a pretty big difference now!
By the time we take our seats on the floor around the circle, I feel like my head is about to explode. A nervous murmur comes from Miss Fountain’s students. They can sense the emotional upset coming from the seven of us. Vladimir is beeping like a robot in one of Mateo’s sci-fi movies, but Aldo is too wound up to respond to his reptilian friend.
Miss Fountain addresses the group: “Who would like to be first to contribute to our circle?”
It comes pouring out of me. “It isn’t Mr. Kermit’s fault that I never registered, and now he’s getting fired, and it isn’t fair—”
I’ve got more to say—a lot more. But my words trigger Aldo, who bursts out, “I hated all teachers until Ribbit came along! And teachers hated me! But then—”
“Everyone thought I was weird before Mr. Kermit’s class!” Mateo blurts over him. “Like I was an android in a human world—”
“Ribbit’s the only person who notices what I’m good at instead of just what I’m bad at—” Rahim adds to the clamor.
“I used to be stupid before Mr. Kermit!” barks Parker. “Nobody ever tried to get me any help—”
“This school only cared about me when I was scoring touchdowns!” Barnstorm blusters. “But Ribbit’s better than that—”
Even strong, silent Elaine speaks up in her deep voice. “I never had any friends until this year—”
We’re all talking at the same time, hollering to make ourselves heard. The seventh graders are really nervous. Vladimir is running crazed loops in his cage because Aldo’s so upset. He’s yelling louder than any of us, his red hair practically defying gravity.
Miss Fountain is trying to restore order, but no one is paying any attention to her. Finally, she inserts both index fingers into her mouth and unleashes an earsplitting whistle that threatens to have plaster raining down on us from the ceiling. It isn’t very Circle Time, but it gets the job done. Silence falls and we stare at the young teacher in awe. How did such a large noise come from such a small person?
“Thank you,” she says, her quiet self again. “Now, where did you kids hear that Mr. Kermit won’t be back after the end of this term?”
Nobody answers, but we all look over in Jake’s direction. Miss Fountain glares at him.
He shrugs helplessly. “It just slipped out.”
Miss Fountain takes a deep breath. “Mr. Terranova, please stay with my group while I take Mr. Kermit’s students back to their own room. We’ve had enough Circle Time for today.”
She sweeps us back to room 117.
“This is so unfair!” I’m still shaking with anger. “How can they do this to Mr. Kermit? How can they do it to us?”
Miss Fountain tries to be sympathetic and reasonable at the same time. “I agree with you, Kiana. It’s very upsetting. But there’s nothing we can do about it. Even Principal Vargas—this is above her level too. It comes straight from the district office.”
Parker is bitter. “Mr. Kermit helped every single one of us. And what can we do to help him back? A big fat zero!”
Something stirs in the back of my head—something I heard a long time ago. Something Miss Fountain said!
And then I have it. “The science fair!”
“What about it?” Barnstorm groans. “Haven’t we had enough science for one lifetime?”
I turn to Miss Fountain. “Remember on the bus ride to Terranova Motors? When you tried to convince Mr. Kermit to have us enter the science fair?”
She looks annoyed. “That was supposed to be a private conversation.”
“Well, I heard it. You told him the winning team gets ten points added to all their scores on the science assessment. Would that be enough to put us over the top and save Mr. Kermit’s job?”
Suddenly, all eyes are on Miss Fountain, waiting for her answer.
“I’m sure it would,” she says finally. “But remember—Mr. Kermit’s answer was no to the science fair.”
“Yeah, but that was before he got canned,” Barnstorm reasons. “That changes everything, right?”
She shakes her head. “Mr. Kermit is a very private person. He wouldn’t want you to take his personal problems onto yourselves.”
“What if we don’t tell him about it?” Rahim muses.
“Be serious,” Miss Fountain insists. “He’s still your teacher until the end of the term. How can you expect to do a science fair project and keep it a secret from him?”
“Terranova Motors!” I exclaim. “I bet Jake will let us work on it there. Miss Fountain, we can do this. I know we can.”
By now, the others are grouped around me, and we’re confronting Miss Fountain as if daring her to say no.
“Entering doesn’t mean you’re going to win,” she reminds us.
“But not entering means we lose for sure,” Mateo counters.
“It’ll be a long shot,” the teacher warns. “You don’t even have a topic yet, and the other groups have already been working for weeks.”
“So it’s a yes?” I prompt.
The cheer that erupts when Miss Fountain nods is loud enough to bring Jake running from the next room. He loves the idea and pledges to do everything he can to help us, courtesy of his dealership.
Rule 1, which Mateo calls the Prime Directive: Mr. Kermit is not allowed to know about our project. If he finds out, the deal is off.
We’ll up our Terranova Motors visits to three afternoons per week. Miss Fountain will come with us if Mr. Kermit will look after her class. We’ll work weekends too. Whatever it takes
.
After lunch, Jake acts as our chaperone on the minibus over to the dealership. As excited as we are, the ride is somber. With Mr. Kermit’s job on the line, the stakes are sky-high. And we haven’t even started planning yet.
“Do you really think we can pull this off?” Parker asks dubiously. “Have you seen the kind of kids who enter the science fair? They’re, like, smart.”
“There are different kind of smarts,” Jake puts in positively. “School is important, but there are things you can’t learn from books.”
“You mean the internet?” Mateo asks.
“I mean street smarts,” Jake explains. “I was never the greatest student, but I knew how to scratch and claw and build a business. Trust me, you guys have street smarts coming out your ears. That’s what’s going to give you the perfect project.”
“What’s the project going to be?” Aldo asks.
“That’s what we have to figure out,” I say. “It can’t be too simple, because we have to blow the judges away. But we don’t have much time, either. The science fair is in three weeks.”
The bus pulls up to the dealership’s service area and we file out onto the pavement. We’re about to enter the building when Parker points. “Hey, isn’t that Mr. Kermit’s car?”
We all look. On a flatbed tow truck parked outside the service bay sits the rusted remains of an ancient Chrysler that might have once been blue. Parts are strewn all around it, also rusted, some broken.
Jake sighs. “Poor guy. Like he doesn’t have enough hanging over his head, now he has to take taxis to school.”
“When’s it going to get fixed?” Mateo asks.
“You don’t fix something like that,” Elaine remarks. “You give it a decent burial.”
Jake nods. “I only towed it here to get it out of the school’s driveway.”
“Seems a shame to waste a whole car,” Parker muses.
“That’s no car,” Barnstorm retorts. “It’s a pile of garbage. It was garbage even when Ribbit was still driving it.”
“Have some respect for the dead,” I put in morosely.
“Respect,” Jake echoes wanly. “Emma says her mom picked out that Chrysler. It’s older than she is.”
Mateo pipes up. “You know the part in Harry Potter where Mr. Weasley uses magic to enchant an old car to make it fly?”
“Not now, Mateo.” I try to say it kindly. “We have to come up with a topic for our science fair project.”
“Well, that’s just it,” he insists. “The car needs respect, and we need a project. All that’s missing is a little magic.”
Twenty-Eight
Mr. Kermit
The minutes blur into hours, which blur into days, which blur into weeks.
The first thing the condemned man loses is his sense of time. All I know is that it’s flying by too fast.
For so long, I couldn’t wait to be finished with my teaching career. Now—barreling full speed and out of control toward the finish line—all I want to do is make it last.
It’s tough to tell the kids that I won’t be back after Christmas, but they take it better than I expected. Maybe they already know—the rumor mill in a middle school can be like that.
They’re the ones who changed everything for me. The “Unteachables.” Ha! That’s what happens when you put a closed-minded bully like Thaddeus in charge—a school district where wonderful students are tossed aside like the trash.
Parker—the kid has a reading problem, nothing more. The fact that no teacher ever bothered to find that out says more against the Greenwich schools than any cheating scandal.
Barnstorm—look at what they let him get away with because he happened to be a sports star. He never learned how to work before because he never had to.
Elaine—I’m as guilty as anybody for taking so long to figure out that Elaine is smart. And she is. She’s also good at hiding it. Her reputation doesn’t help. But teachers are supposed to see around things like that.
Mateo—the school jumped to conclusions about the kid’s quirky personality. They wrote him off. He deserves better.
Rahim was allowed to sleep and doodle through sixth and seventh grade before he was dumped into SCS-8. Today, he’s an absolute star over at the community college, but what’s more important is how well he’s doing in eighth grade.
Aldo might be the only one who belongs in SCS-8. But he’s come a long, long way. He passed that science test—and the fact that he did isn’t half as amazing as the fact that he even bothered to try.
Finally Kiana. She never had any business being in the class. She just drifted in and stayed. And not a single faculty member—myself included—bothered to look into who she was and what she was doing there. True, it worked out in the end. Kiana is a huge part of what went right in room 117. But she could just as easily have fallen through the cracks, and all her potential would have been wasted.
What’s going to happen to the kids on December 22 when I have to leave? Kiana will be fine. She’ll be back in California, and anyway, a bright girl like that will find a way to succeed wherever she ends up. But what about the others? Will the class get a real teacher, or will the replacement be a babysitter? Or worse, a warden? It’s too easy to see the progress of the past weeks being rolled back. Christina will try to do right by the students. But in the end, Dr. Thaddeus calls the shots. He might even kibosh the trips to Terranova Motors, which mean so much to the kids.
It hurts to admit it, but the transformation of SCS-8 never could have happened without Jake. Part of it’s the field trips, the time away from school. For kids like Aldo and Parker, the things they learned about cars are among the first things they ever learned, period. Or at least, learned without hating it. It might have started out as Jake trying to make up for his misdeeds of twenty-seven years ago, but he’s taken a real interest in those kids, and they know it. When someone cares about you, it’s natural to respond.
Strange that the man who used to be twelve-year-old Jake should star in my teaching rebirth. And his costar? Even stranger—Emma Fountain, daughter of my fiancée who married someone else. Emma may be a fish out of water in middle school, with her bucket-filling and her Goodbunnies. But her energy and enthusiasm are boundless and pure. She awakened a love of teaching in me that was buried before she was even born.
Lately, I’ve been covering Emma’s classes while she takes the SCS-8 group over to the dealership. I can’t bring myself to go there anymore. I’ve made a kind of peace with Jake, even started to like him a little. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s the reason Dr. Thaddeus developed his grudge way back when. Better to stay here in room 115, running Circle Time and playing nursemaid to Vladimir.
Emma’s students are okay. Mostly there are just too many of them. Forty-three minutes go by, a bell rings, and a new crew is sitting there, looking exactly like the old crew. I can’t tell them apart—not like the Unteachables, who are so distinctive and full of personality. Nobody is likely to mistake Aldo or Elaine for any other middle schooler.
As the weeks fly past and December 22 looms closer, I savor my time with the kids the way a gourmet lingers over a fine soufflé. The class is spending so many afternoons at Terranova Motors these days that they’re almost lost to me already. They leave on the minibus at eleven and barely make it back before the three-thirty bell.
I read and reread Kiana’s essays, lingering over her well-reasoned arguments; I relish the discussions with Elaine and Aldo as they work their way through Where the Red Fern Grows; I listen for the faint sound of Parker whistling through his teeth, a surefire sign that he’s reading without having to struggle over every word. I cherish these things because I know I won’t have them much longer.
At this point, every puffy-tail I award may well be my last.
At home, the walls of the apartment are closing in on me.
It never bothered me before, but it’s driving me crazy now. This is the future, kicking around these two and a half rooms, one bath. I was plannin
g to cash it in at the end of this year anyway. But with early retirement, I would have been able to redecorate, maybe even move to a nicer place in a better part of town. For sure I would have traveled. I might not have the money for that now. And anyway, I’m so down that I can’t think of a single spot on this green Earth that I’m interested in visiting.
Of course, I could look for a new job. There are other schools in America. But Thaddeus has pretty much taken care of that. How do you explain to a prospective employer that you were fired for cause? Any Google search of the name Zachary Kermit will eventually spit out the words cheating scandal, and that’ll be a deal breaker. Besides, at fifty-five, I’m not exactly a spring chicken. Starting over from scratch isn’t a very attractive option.
Saturday morning. I shuffle into the kitchen to investigate the prospects for breakfast. A cheese stick and a semi-stale dinner roll. I’ve stopped food shopping again. I was doing okay for a while, but the bad news jolted me into old ways. Oh well, with coffee, it should at least go down and stay there.
Breakfast is interrupted by a series of clicks. It’s the doorbell—or what would be the doorbell if the doorbell worked. Must be a mistake. Nobody ever comes to visit, and I haven’t ordered anything.
I pad barefoot to the door and peer through the peephole into the smiling face of Emma Fountain. What does she want at eight o’clock on a Saturday morning?
She says, “Don’t pretend you’re not home, Mr. Kermit. I can hear you walking around in there.”
I open the door. “What brings you here so early?”
“I’ve come to give you a ride to the science fair,” she replies, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
“I’m not going to the science fair,” I tell her. “I’m not feeling very warm and fuzzy toward that school these days.”
“But you can’t miss it!” she pleads. “What about the kids?”
The Unteachables Page 14